How to Shop Like the Coupon Goddess
The Coupon Goddess is an infamous blogger who captures great savings each year through the use of coupons. Her family's yearly savings are typically in excess of $50,000. By strategically applying coupons to sale prices at chain grocery stores and pharmacies, the Coupon Goddess drastically cuts her family's spending on grocery and pharmacy items to help stretch each paycheck to its fullest. You can apply her techniques to your shopping for immediate savings at the cash register.
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Instructions
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Begin clipping coupons from the Sunday paper and searching for coupons online through websites such as Coupons.com, SmartSource and RedPlum (see Resources). Purchase multiples of favorite coupons through eBay or a coupon clipping service. By purchasing multiples of favorite coupons, you canbuy multiples of low cost items to create a stockpile of cheaper, often used goods. A coupon clipping service cuts thousands of inserts and then sells the clipped coupons for a few cents per coupon. If you get a large quantity of items you need at a cheap price, the price of the coupons is worth the extra expense. Ebay sellers offer either multiples of a same coupon or lots of 100 or more random coupons up for auction to buyers. In this method, you may or may not know which coupons you will receive. By using Ebay or a clipping service, you may be able to purchase coupons not available in your area, as many coupons offered are offered at different face values in different regions of the country. For example, a detergent coupon for one brand name may be 25 cents off in Georgia, but 75 cents off in New York. A Georgia buyer can purchase the New York coupon to yield a greater savings on his eventual detergent purchase.
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Organize your coupons. Many people use envelopes to sort coupons by store or type --- such as health and beauty or grocery coupons. Others use baseball or business card holders stored in a notebook for easy searching and use. The Coupon Goddess uses a notebook filled with baseball card holders to organize a majority of her coupons. This allows her to quickly flip through her large stack of coupons and see which ones are available to match to sale prices. Additionally, she sorts the coupons by type, such as health and beauty items, grocery items and non-grocery items, in each section of the notebook.
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Match your coupons to items on sale at your grocery store to maximize your savings. For example, the regular price of a can of green beans may be a dollar at your store. When on sale, the green beans are 75 cents, subtract a 50 cents coupon and that can becomes 25 cents.
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Search coupon blogs in your area to do additional research. Many blogs, such as SouthernSavers, list the local grocery or pharmacy chains' weekly sale ads and match the corresponding coupons to the items to save you time. Additionally, they link up printable coupons to the sale items to show you other available coupons to use. For example, if you shop at Harris Teeter, the Southern Savers blog will have an article listing all of the items in this week's sales circular. Under each item, there will be a listing of all available coupons, along with the end price to the consumer if the coupon is used. So, if the buyer saw that Harris Teeter had a can of creamed corn on sale for 75 cents, he would also be able to tell that there were two available coupons, one for 50 cents and one for 25 cents off of the can of cream corn. Obviously, he would want to use the 50 cents off coupon, if he had it to yield the greater savings. These blogs help the buyer to organize their thoughts, coupons and eventual shopping trip by laying out the savings available each week.
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Purchase extras of often-used items when the price hits as low as possible to create a stockpile for future use. For example, say you use about two tubes of toothpaste a month in your household. At two dollars a tube, that's $48 a year in toothpaste. However, if it goes on sale at the pharmacy for $1 and you have a 75-cents-off coupon, you can stock up on that toothpaste at 25 cents per tube of toothpaste. If you bought all 24 toothpastes (a year's supply) at 25 cents, your yearly cost for toothpaste would drop from $48 to just $6. This principle of stockpiling is applicable to all purchases made with coupons. Stockpiling is how The Coupon Goddess saves her family thousands of dollars each year. When she sees an item whose final price after the combination of the sale price and coupon is free or very cheap, she purchases multiples of that item to reduce her overall expense on that item throughout the year. In most items that have a long shelf life, she has a 6 month to a year supply for her family in her basement.
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Tips & Warnings
To get more copies of your Sunday's newspaper coupons without spending extra money, ask neighbors for any unused coupon inserts. Offer to recycle the paper for them in exchange for this gift. Additionally, if you begin to accumulate free or almost free items that you know they will use, give the neighbors the items as a thank you for the newspaper inserts.
Remember its only a bargain if you're going to use the items you purchased. While that 25 cent toothpaste is a great deal, it becomes a waste of money if it expires before you use it. Buy only what you can use prior to the expiration date to avoid wasting money.
References
Resources
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